From PP Waste to High-Quality Products ? Decontamination of the Material Throughout the Entire Recycling Process Chain Using State-of-the-Art Technologies
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
39th Interantional Conference of the Polymer Processing Society
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
How to make waste valuable? This is one burning question of the 21st century. To achieve high-quality products out of waste, recycled plastics should be comparable with virgin plastics. Unfortunately, that is impossible without considerable effort to separate specific materials from others, clean them properly, and convert them again into products.Such a process chain of mechanical recycling was run with an advanced combination of state-of-the-art technologies considering the decontamination of the material throughout the different steps of this study. At a Netherlands-based research facility, mixed post consumer polypropylene (PP) from Dutch households was first sorted by object level through multiple loops, subsequently shredded to flakes and pre-washed before the actual deep cleaning processes, and finally sorted by flake sorting. This procedure resulted in superficially decontaminated white, transparent, and colored fractions of PP. Additionally, the PP flakes were divided into fractions with and without deinking agents to investigate any effect on the material quality caused by the chemicals. The material conversion was conducted at JKU with recycling technology including pre-conditioning, filtration, degassing, and granulation. At this stage, residual particles and volatile organic compounds (VOC) were removed, which can cause odor or be a health risk. In addition to the samples of the sorted and pre-washed flakes, flakes with and without deinking, and the converted materials, yogurt cups were produced to test also on product level. Analytical methods were used to determine the decontamination regarding VOC. The results of this study picture the currently achievable qualities of recycled PP with available state-of-the-art technologies in mechanical recycling. As a consequence, this information should be used to improve the potential process steps to head further to high-quality recycled plastics.
Forschungs-